Book recommendation:

Star Maker

This was my gateway drug to science fiction and is still my favorite in the genre (it's from 1937). The narrator takes a billion year evolutionary journey during a short reverie while sitting outside one evening — further deepening my fascination with the idea of structures of all kinds persisting across scales. Apart from that, it's a gorgeous book. (Also, apparently it influenced H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur C. Clarke, Doris Lessing and Stanislaw Lem.)